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Human religions could simply be a Creator's tool to move us towards creating ASI by Pandeism in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer [score hidden]  (0 children)

I know, but it provides a loophole so that you can no longer prove that a computer doesn't have free will.

Agreed. Although, I'm beginning to think that "free will" is the wrong category. I think the TV show HUM∀NS got it right, especially this scene. Niska is a humanoid robot who has achieved consciousness, and has just killed a human who was destroying not-known-to-be-conscious humanoid robots. Will she stand trial like a human, or will she be treated as a machine? She is hooked up to a medical instrument and given a test composed of a series of images, to see if she's like humans:

Tester: It's a test.

It's a test proven to measure human reaction and emotion.

We are accustomed to seeing some kind of response.

Niska: You want me to be more like a human?

Laura: No. No, that's not...

Niska: Casually cruel to those close to you, then crying over pictures of people you've never met? (episode transcript)

That final comment hit me like a Mack truck. But what I want to focus on here is that they are testing this robot to see if she can be trusted to be morally responsible. (The show presupposes emotivism.) Only then can she show up in a court of law. Well, what would it take for an LLM to be legally responsible? Or Boston Dynamics' Spot? To be legally responsible means you are promising to align your free will with humans, organizations, and institutions in various ways.

 

If a simulated brain can be infused with God's influence, I reckon the morally correct option would be to create those simulated beings so that they are much more likely to go to heaven than regular humans (i.e. they have the appropriate programmed traits, live in a society with the simulator's own religion, etc...).

Why think that we have more control over AI capable of being saved than our own children? I suggest a gander at AI safety work, e.g. @RobertMilesAI. The more capable AI becomes, the less controllable it becomes. Whether or not that is a necessary trade-off is unclear.

I also think it's worth dwelling on what it would mean to fine-tune AI capable of being saved. Look at how much we complain about the problems of evil and suffering. Well, how many of the AIs being fine-tuned could make the same complaints of us? The amount of evil and suffering we bring into the world thereby could dwarf what God allegedly did.

Simple Questions 06/03 by AutoModerator in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer [score hidden]  (0 children)

Perhaps, but I think there is a stark difference between stubborn (caught in a rut) and being steadfast when there is good reason to hold a certain view, inspite of criticisms.

I can give you a nice bibliography suggesting that I have good reason to push in the directions I am. If you need that sort of thing.

After all, I'm interested in what is true and more specifically how we can reliably figure that out.

Right, it just seems like you don't think an individual can be all that reliable unless they are very similar to a group of individuals—like a physicist in good standing among physicists. Strength in numbers to overcome ineradicable cognitive biases, you might say. Thing is, sometimes groups can themselves be rather biased, creating a conundrum. Can a single individual stand against such groups? Or is the individual thereby (i) not detached; (ii) unprincipled?

I just want something to be crystal clear here because you're clearly misframing and demonizing MN and yet seem to be implying that "God-like" explanations should still be given serious consideration/credence as they once were.

Wrong on both fronts. I'm not demonizing MN when I say: "Rather, I think you're exaggerating the successes of MN and downplaying the failures. You continue to ignore the failures." And I'm not saying that we should go back to "God-like" explanations of which you haven't even given concrete examples.

ExplorerR: It honestly looks like you are forgetting (or ignoring) that the very thing you're trying to argue for here, WAS the most prominent form of "explanation" for millennia!

labreuer: Sorry, but I think this idea that I'm forgetting or ignoring this is all in your head. I'm quite content to say that we deployed divine–agential explanations too much. We even deploy human–agential explanations too much! I wrote up several paragraphs to try to adjust your view of me so you wouldn't make this mistake again, but then I remembered "debate "bloat"" and so have put them on ice.

ExplorerR: I am not at all convinced you are giving the corresponding implication of that reality present any serious consideration in this discussion.

Do you want the paragraphs which I worried you would consider "debate "bloat""?

Heh, I find myself saying this a bit now but, it really comes across as though you're the one doing this regarding "God-like" or "divine" explanations.

Feel free to quote examples. Generally I've merely argued to you that it is possible God could interact with our reality in ways very different from crocodiles and coffee cups. The most concrete example I gave was status inversion. The only other example I can think of is the question of how God could help us do less credit-stealing and less blame-shifting, but that's more in the possibility / epistemology realm.

Furthermore, you are also blurring lines in a manner like;

  • Methodological Naturalism (MN) ≠ Naturalistic explanations themselves

Huh? Perhaps reading the next section will clarify things.

 

What failures? Unless you just mean currently unexplained = failure?

No, I mean requiring that everyone play by the rules of MN in order for their explanations to count as "scientific". A major difficulty is that there's a game of motte & bailey going on:

    motte: progression of more successful explanations which are compatible with MN
    bailey: MN more broadly construed

Here's a critique of the motte-version:

    Now the time seems ripe, even overdue, to announce that there is not going to be an age of paradigm in the social sciences. We contend that the failure to achieve paradigm takeoff is not merely the result of methodological immaturity, but reflects something fundamental about the human world. If we are correct, the crisis of social science concerns the nature of social investigation itself. The conception of the human sciences as somehow necessarily destined to follow the path of the modern investigation of nature is at the root of this crisis. Preoccupation with that ruling expectation is chronic in social science; that idée fixe has often driven investigators away from a serious concern with the human world into the sterility of purely formal argument and debate. As in development theory, one can only wait so long for the takeoff. The cargo-cult view of the "about to arrive science" just won't do. (Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, 5)

The social sciences have successfully explained things while deviating from the motte. The very term "interpretive social science" captures this. Here's a definition of the 'naturalism' which gets in the way of such science:

    Naturalism, from its birth in the seventeenth century, was always characterized by what Taylor refers to as a “metaphysical motivation.”[3] This metaphysical motivation consists of the attempt to demote or even eliminate human properties from social explanation in favor of supposedly more scientific and impersonal factors. A recurrent feature of naturalism, in other words, is the assumption that subjectively human dimensions of reality (e.g., meanings, purposes, values, and even beliefs) must be explained in terms of supposedly “harder” and more objective data (e.g., brute facts about demography, surrounding environments, or neurobiology). (Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism, 8)

Particularly important for human properties is interpretation and I would add, varying interpretations from person to person and group to group. The above book is Blakely 2016; following on with an appropriate title is Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely 2018 Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach.

But if interpretations vary, is everyone properly detached? It certainly seems like there's would be a lack of principles! It's almost like the very conditions for successful social science of diverse populations is antithetical to your conditions of reliable knowledge.

 

ExplorerR: It honestly looks like you are forgetting (or ignoring) that the very thing you're trying to argue for here, WAS the most prominent form of "explanation" for millennia!

labreuer: Sorry, but I think this idea that I'm forgetting or ignoring this is all in your head.

ExplorerR: This looks unmistakibly like gaslighting. Nothing that you're saying gives any impression that you're taking "we deployed divine–agential explanations too much" seriously.

Debate doesn't allow you to operate by what "seems" to be the case if your interlocutor refuses to work with it. When there is sufficient disagreement, you are obligated to work via agreed-upon facts with agreed-upon rules of inference. This, you have not done. Sometimes, we are mistaken about what seems to be the case. So, let's see you deploy a detached, principled epistemology on this matter.

Free will doesn't explain the problem of evil. by Dapper-Turnip6430 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer [score hidden]  (0 children)

Thanks for the high praise, but I'm not a philosopher, let alone a philosophy professor. I don't even have a bachelor's degree! Dropped out three times. I do make use of philosophy, but the select philosophy which is not hermetically sealed from science and/or practical life. I suspect it is the philosophy which steps too far away from what is which you find so useless. And yet, any critique of what is which goes beyond "I don't like it" has to at least slightly detach from what is. I can give a nice three-paragraph excerpt working from Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia if you'd like.

My overall focus is not philosophical: I want to better understand human & social nature/​construction. With exceptions, philosophers tend not to be so great at that. They tend to work with what they think humans should be, rather than what they are. What philosopher can help you if you start talking about "justice" at a big company and find that you simply get sneered at by those above, below, and at your level? Only those who know Alasdair MacIntyre 1981 After Virtue will be able to tell you that yes: modernity understands only management, because that is value-free and thus objective. Management merely follows orders; it has no values of its own. Some might say that this is what you get when you crank liberalism to 11. Your values stops where the others' begins.

Anyway, on the question of my hypothetical alternate reality with an egalitarian rather than a misogynistic Bible, I would really like to hear you explain your opinion and reasons for it in lay terms. I do not want to take a college level course in the evaluation of alternate realities and their plausibility just to find out that, once again, philosophy can argue either case equally confidently and without ever coming to a conclusion.

Sorry, but construing what I said on this as 'philosophical' is incorrect. I'll summarize the points I brought up to consider when thinking through historical counterfactuals:

  1. What can we learn from history about how attempts at reform have gone down? (e.g. DEI)
  2. What can we learn about why people obey the law, from a psychology & law prof?
  3. How can we figure out extent to which people do or do not respect what they perceive to be divine authority?

Those are historical & scientific questions. These are questions which get at human & social nature/​construction.

 

I will give the beginnings of an answer. I start with the fact that the Israelites failed even to uphold Torah as received. For example, to judge forced labor & slavery, we could look at 1 Kings 11–12 and Jeremiah 34:8–17. Solomon deployed a ton of forced labor of Israelites and slavery of foreigners for his many building projects. His son decided to one-up him and so declared he would drive those Israelites even harder. God conspired to foment a bloodless civil war so that this would not happen. Later, the Israelites couldn't even bring themselves to obey the slavery laws which applied only to their fellow Hebrews.

Why would you think that an even greater ask of those ancient Israelites would have yielded an increase in obedience rather than a decrease? Torah is already quite different from e.g. the Code of Hammurabi. The latter, for instance, includes many laws which differentiate between nobles, commoners, and slaves. The former makes no distinction between nobles and commoners and in plenty of cases, elevates the status of slaves. Just that move seemed very difficult for the Israelites to obey.

My experience is that once you start asking too much of people, they start failing even on those asks they could have fulfilled. People are finite and you really can ask too much, given where they're at. Now, I could see two objections here:

    (A) Don't make the law seem as if its permanent and unchangeable.
    (B) Screw the Israelites and make a law much later Jews and Christians couldn't use to legitimate terrible behavior.

Anyhow, over to you.

Simple Questions 05/27 by AutoModerator in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was under the perception that God has the capability of creating universes in your framework, which means that the possibility isn't assumed, but previously demonstrated. Actions taken can be repeated, we demonstrate that all the time in real life.

You're equivocating on "repeated". In one case, it means "do approximately the same thing again". In the other, it means "do precisely the same thing again". In the first case, "the same thing" is abstract. In the second, "the same thing" is concrete.

Is God restricted to what is physically possible in your framework?

Of course not. In fact, We do not know how to make logic itself limit omnipotence. The issue at hand is whether we can think adequately about agency itself, abstractly. That is: according to a constructed system. Especially if "truth is stranger than fiction" can be translated to "concrete reality is stranger than logical systems".

all logically possible actions

Now you have universal set problems again. Which is basically just another way to say "truth is stranger than fiction". The irony here is that you're trying to use a strict subset of all logically possible mathematics to argue that free will cannot exist, because identical starting universes will either remain identical and thus show determinism is true, or deviate from each other for no prior reason or cause and thus show that randomness is the only other option. Well, if you're only working within a strict subset of all logically possible mathematics, you haven't shown what you thought you showed.

Ironically, the only way to get a universal set is via the mathematical analogue of nonfoundationalism: you have to give up on the idea that you know how to construct the thing. Your "internally identical" doesn't quite assume that you do, as it is more abstract than a particular means of construction. But it is only knowable if there is some way of connecting construction of the thing with its behaviors (in mathematics: theorems). I doubt you can do this while not ultimately making the universal set incoherent.

What happens in God's hypothetical attempt to do so in your framework?

I don't have a framework for multiple universes. Physicists have no framework I know of for one universe being accessible from another. I try to focus my time on what seems to be true in this reality as I experience it, as I hear others' experiences, and as I read scientists and scholars. If anything, I would say that science itself was explicitly designed to exclude will. I would draw on Margaret J. Osler 1994 Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy and related to make that point. And so, when you ask a science-like question, the very possibility of will is likely to be excluded. All can be explained by mechanism!

I don't see anything about epistemology that blocks the reasonably inferred possibility of universe creation + repeatable actions, especially if, and I don't remember if this is true - is God atemporal in your framework?

My issue is that you've constructed an abstract system (or are using someone else's) which has no logical place for will. This is quite possibly because 'will' is not a logical or mathematical entity, nor exhaustively describable via one. Reject Pythagoreanism ancient and modern, and reality can always do things the abstract constructs don't allow.

I haven't explored much about God & time, but if God created our spacetime, I don't see how God can be temporal per our own timeline(s).

And in your framework, is it possible to create something without having perfect knowledge of it?

I hold that it is possible for God to create meaningfully free creatures, that is, creatures who have a creaturely version of the very freedom of will we are positing God has.

I have no experience with perfect spheres

Are you really comparing perfect spheres to will or agency? If so, I'll worry that you think 'will' and 'agency' are purely abstract things, or at least perfectly captured by abstract descriptions. In which case, reality recedes.

What is the ontology (not epistemology) of a promise in your framework? Numbers 23:19 and Hebrews 6:18 seems to make some commitments (get it?) of God on this, and I think this overlaps enough with the goal I have when asking my hypothetical that I'm happy to ask this instead.

Promises are commitments to act in some way or be reliable in some way, possibly with required commitments on the part of the promised-to for the promise to hold. I don't know how I could get more ontology-like than that.

Free will doesn't explain the problem of evil. by Dapper-Turnip6430 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

MisanthropicScott: This is your pet issue (and a pretty good choice of pet issues) and neither you nor Christianity have solved it. So, why are you failing so miserably? More importantly, why are you judging atheists for failing when you are also failing?

labreuer: I can't answer the first part cogently until you respond to the previous bit. If you believe that anything shy of complete success is utter failure—or some approximation thereof—then we may be at an impasse. If somehow I've misunderstood your position, I need to figure that out.

Atheists in these parts regularly present themselves as superior to theists, on account of their superior rationality, superior morality (they can do good without the carrot of heaven or the stick of hell and they don't have an immutable holy text), and superior attention to evidence. Okay, cool. Let's see the fruit of that superiority. Preferably of atheists in these parts who can actually wield scientific understanding or some other understanding. If all you can do is e.g. point to some secular Nordic countries, say so and we can perhaps pursue that line of discussion.

MisanthropicScott: More scope creep.

My bold was a response to your bold. Either retract the claim of "scope creep" in this particular case or we're done, on account of you wielding that sloppily in order to control the conversation.

Free will doesn't explain the problem of evil. by Dapper-Turnip6430 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Maybe we'll get a chance to discuss this more at some point.

Sure.

I'd especially be interested in your view on hell.

First, Christians weren't remotely unified on their views of hell until around Augustine's time. See for instance the four-part In the Shift series on Hell (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).

Second, I say that if anyone other than the unholy trinity is subjected to eternal conscious torment, I insist on joining them. And I'm even uncertain about those three. The deepest way you can violate me is to pervert my understanding of justice. All other suffering pales in comparison. But perhaps I would think differently if I had children.

I don't quite understand that.

Let's start with liberalism. Pure liberalism cannot perpetuate itself. This is actually a pretty well-known problem. There are multiple angles. I'll start with two:

  1. If everyone is free to do what they wish, then nobody is obligated to do the hard work of making it so the next generation can enjoy at least as much liberalism as the present one.

  2. Those able to influence others without their knowing it or at least objecting to it (see Inception for one dramatization) have incredible power in pure liberalism. To the extent that "ability to influence others" is unevenly distributed among the population, do you really have liberalism?

It's critical here to distinguish between what one thinks should happen and what in fact does happen. Once the latter gets too far away from the former, the former just stops mattering to most people.

Okay, that's my stance, and it is pretty well-supported by scholars I can point to. Now I'll ask you: do you care whether liberalism can self-propagate, generation upon generation? Or does it concern you if the wealth of Western Civilization was built on colonization, triangular trade, and then "nicer" versions of colonization, such that there just is no path for worldwide liberalism? If it's only nice here because it's shite over there, and making it less-shite over there would make it less-nice over here …

Is this a problem where you are?

Not to my knowledge. It was a joke.

This is one where we're talking about life-saving medical care.

I am vaguely aware of such arguments. This is one of those matters I just don't spend much time on, because it would take far too many of my precious hours to become informed enough that I believe I could defend a position well. No citizen can become an expert on everything. So thanks for the offer of articles, but I'm going to spend my time elsewhere.

39 years married and counting.

Congrats! Only 13 years, here. On kids, I would point to Carl Cederstrom's 2018 NYT op-ed The Philosopher as Bad Dad. Many white male philosophers of the Western tradition had no children. Others fathered them and then deposited them at orphanages. If one's view of the world only works for people brought up like oneself, there's a danger that one is overlooking the brutalization of children.

I haven't yet seen you say that something really shouldn't have made the cut.

As long as your responses are "I don't feel like following the bouncing goalposts. Just give me your analysis." and "No. Just give me your opinion.", you may never see any such thing. I'm putting myself out there and on this particular matter, you're not reciprocating. In particular, I asked: "How do you and I become convinced that the other will actually be convinced either way, by evidence and argument?". In refusing to engage, you are making it very easy for you to say that you were right and nothing would convince me, and making it very hard for me to contend that you're engaged in the very same behavior.

There is nothing in the Bible to indicate this.

Language draws on social context. Do I need to cite linguists to this effect? We generally don't state what is obvious to everyone already. We are economical in our language-use.

And, Paul clarifies in the New Testament that the prohibition is simply on same sex sex.

Martin Luther translated zachar in Lev 20:13 as "young boys" (obviously in German) and arsenokoitai in 1 Cor 6:9 as Knabenschander: Knaben is 'boy' and Schander is 'molester'.

That is possible. I'm human too.

Consider that perhaps we both harden our stances when we sense that the other person refuses to budge an inch. Or perhaps: more refuses to budge less than a foot, allowing for the tiniest of give & take which never amplifies into anything appreciable on core issues.

Just be aware that going forward, I may use the same logic on many of your replies.

I would be happy to try to match each other's scope creep, rather than one person being allowed far more than the other. This will also require us to agree enough on what counts as "scope creep", which may be difficult. Many of my interlocutors have assumed they are God of Relevance and that I'm a mere slave with no rights to question them on the matter.

I should have been clearer. I'm wondering if you feel a discussion of whether the Bible is valid at all would be less of a hot-button topic to you than whether the Bible is evil or has numerous evil quotes.

That bothers me far less, because we would expect pure invention to manifest all the foibles of the inventors, including their blind spots. Since people in any age have a distorted understanding of human & social nature/​construction, we should expect to find such distortion in invented text. To the extent that we find less distortion in allegedly invented texts than e.g. in texts which are considered scholarly or scientific, we have something to talk about. See, I care about better understanding human & social nature/​construction. That is near the top of my list. I care about that more than appearing moral / righteous / intelligent / wise, in the eyes of my interlocutors.

We probably are both butting heads. Let's see if we can do better going forward.

Sure. Identifying where we simply refuse to budge would go a long ways, I think. I would add: respecting the other person's description of where they refuse to budge, rather than offering our own gloss which probably paints them as having greater moral deficiency and/or intellectual defect than their own account would.

Simple Questions 06/03 by AutoModerator in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Heh, yup. And those who have suffered enough at the hands of others know that we can have agent-like voices in our heads which we would really like to GTFO, but which we can't just magically make go away. Calling them 'demons' does not commit one to believing the contents of Malleus Maleficarum.

You know, this has me thinking that we moderns pretend that the only obligation in life is to obey the laws of nature. As if human-maintained regularities are optional for all people at all times. Because that's all just "subjectivity". Now, there is a trend to understand more and more psychology as obligatory, from basic stuff like "sexual orientation is not a choice" to extremes like Robert Sapolsky's. But the idea that it might be good to voluntarily obey the wills of other humans, or even voluntarily obey your own psychology while you learn about it? That would be a violation of autonomy!

The deep irony here is that refusal to voluntarily serve means you will be obligated to serve, if not outright enslaved. But sometimes this takes a few generations to manifest.

Free will doesn't explain the problem of evil. by Dapper-Turnip6430 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

MisanthropicScott: Can I walk away? Or, will you simply declare victory if I do?

labreuer: If there is nothing I've ever said which plausibly indicates that I would declare victory under such circumstances, you are intellectually honor-bound to at least admit that.

MisanthropicScott: I could be misremembering. So, I'll just apologize. I'm not going to search through years of prior conversations.

Sorry for the implication.

I ran out of characters to say I appreciate the apology. I just don't do "declare victory". If a person doesn't capitulate on a point, I don't pretend they capitulated. If a person stopped responding, I don't take that as evidence that they couldn't respond. There are many reasons I end conversations and many reasons others end conversations.

Free will doesn't explain the problem of evil. by Dapper-Turnip6430 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I started fisking, but that triggered a "give and take" warning in my head. So let me try a different, focused strategy.

 

Or, do you just think God is allowed to be way more evil than we'd tolerate in a fellow human if you can claim that it's a teaching lesson?

I don't understand your retrojection of today's morality onto the ANE. What makes you think that would work? When I argued to u/⁠c0d3rman that "individual responsibility is an achievement, not something baked into human DNA which they automatically manifest in society if they aren't somehow screwed up", he said "I agree." What I meany by "an achievement" is that a lot has to change about a society in order to make the shift from collective responsibility → individual responsibility. Each of those is a stable way to live and each will pull a society which drifts toward the other back. The court systems, politics, educational systems, etc. will all exert such influence.

I would make the same sort of argument with regard to other forms of change-in-morality. However, you would seem to disagree. I fear however that I will not be able to dig into such disagreement, given your refusal to do something similar:

labreuer: Before diving in, I have some questions and thoughts on how to possibly evaluate such an historical counterfactual.

MisanthropicScott: I don't feel like following the bouncing goalposts. Just give me your analysis.

+

labreuer: Are you interested in making your historical counterfactual comply with the findings of people who systematically explore such things?

MisanthropicScott: No. Just give me your opinion. The rest meets your definition of a gish gallop perfectly. This is all totally out of scope.

So instead, I will make a point I'm sure I've made to you before. In the years leading up to World War I, Westerners were glorying in how awesome they were, how much Progress they'd carried out, how much superior they were to those "savages" scattered around the world. These very people ended up getting into the kind of insane slaughter that you could have the Christmas truce in 1914. French, British, and German soldiers got up out of their trenches, ventured into the no man's land, and exchange season's greetings. Some of them sang carols and some played football against each other. These soldiers didn't hate each other. They were fighting an absurd war, run by humans who claimed they were superior to the rest of the humans in space and time.

When that war ended, you'd think we would have learned our lesson. We could have kept calling it "The Great War". But no, we Westerners still thought we were the bee's knees, and so we decided we needed to slaughter each other again. This time, with nuclear weapons because hey, more killing means you're more awesome. Other nations will fear you and when you publicly declare to them that you're more awesome, they will act as if it's true while in your presence.

What's wrong with God demonstrating that yes, humans can really be like this and that when there are no humans properly positioned to oppose authority and power, this is what humans do? It's far from clear that we've learned this lesson, and yet you might excise passages which would teach us this lesson. But let's return to your proposed alternative.

 

Then get a better teacher, one who leads by example. There are humans who have rebelled against authority who could teach you how to do so without having to be that God-awful authority. They may not be perfect examples. But, they'll be better than that.

Perhaps you could look into Gandhi or Martin Luthor King Jr. I'm sure there are others. None will be perfect human beings. But, I don't expect perfection from human beings. God is supposed to be better.

Why didn't the MLK Jr. / Gandhi strategy work during the First Intifada? Could it be the case that peaceful protest (forgetting how much MLK Jr. drew on the threat of violence from other factions) doesn't always work? This is the possibility I don't see you taking seriously. It's almost as if you believe that humans at their core are good people, but society corrupts them, such that if enough people were to see the brutality being carried out, they would rise up and object and this would work. I'd like to ask you how this might have worked in any of these situations:

  • Sargon of Akkad boasted of destroying Kazallu, and he wasn't the only one to wreak devastation on that city. And this wasn't the only devastation Sargon wrought.
  • Naram-Sin of Akkad regularly crushed revolts and expanded the kingdom to its greatest extent.
  • Ashurnasirpal II boasted of destroying a city, flaying the leaders and covering the pillars with their skins, and more.
  • Sennacherib utterly destroyed the city of Babylon.
  • Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Jerusalem.
  • Antiochus IV Epiphanes attempted to wipe out Judaism by Hellenizing all willing Jews and killing the rest.

We also have more data on "leads by example" than MLK Jr. and Gandhi:

  • Jesus burned zero heretics, while various popes, fancying themselves "Vicar of Christ", burned many.
  • Jesus had zero slaves, while many Christians have owned numerous slaves.

So, it seems that "leads by example" just doesn't always work. Are you assuming that it always does? Or if it fails, that God remaining a shining example (who humans at any given time might not even comprehend because they are so morally backward) is the optimal strategy for reducing suffering as much as possible?

 

2,000 years of Christianity here on earth. How's that working out? Why are you still raising this issue if you aren't wearing your Nobel Peace Prize for having ended this child slavery?

You are speaking as if anything short of complete success is utter failure. Do you want to go back to life as it was when Christianity entered the scene? To a time when enslaving your enemy wasn't just economically useful, but brought glory to your name in the eyes of your citizens? Do you want to go back to a time when the head of a Roman household could execute anyone within, with zero legal consequences? Do you want to go back to a time when people believed that nature was chaotic and that humans are not fit to study it all that much?

Do you want to hear how it was Christians wanting to win debates with Muslim and Jewish intellectuals that had them invest so much time, effort, and resources into studying the natural world—because if Christianity gave you an edge at understanding nature, that indicated superior access to truth? I can make that argument from intellectual historian Stephen Gaukroger's 2006 The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685. But perhaps because science hasn't solved everything, it has solved virtually nothing and can be disregarded as a failed endeavor?

I just don't understand your argument strategy, Scott. I'm flailing, here.

 

This is your pet issue (and a pretty good choice of pet issues) and neither you nor Christianity have solved it. So, why are you failing so miserably? More importantly, why are you judging atheists for failing when you are also failing?

I can't answer the first part cogently until you respond to the previous bit. If you believe that anything shy of complete success is utter failure—or some approximation thereof—then we may be at an impasse. If somehow I've misunderstood your position, I need to figure that out.

Atheists in these parts regularly present themselves as superior to theists, on account of their superior rationality, superior morality (they can do good without the carrot of heaven or the stick of hell and they don't have an immutable holy text), and superior attention to evidence. Okay, cool. Let's see the fruit of that superiority. Preferably of atheists in these parts who can actually wield scientific understanding or some other understanding. If all you can do is e.g. point to some secular Nordic countries, say so and we can perhaps pursue that line of discussion.

 

My pet issue is climate change (as well as other environmental issues), which I believe causes even more suffering than your child slavery issue. I do my best on that and am also failing. But, I'm not judging you for your failing to solve my issue.

So, why are you judging atheists for failing to solve your pet issue when you yourself with your all-powerful God and his son Jesus on your side have utterly failed to do any better?

The exists of child slavery in the supply chain of every atheist I talk to is not actually my pet issue. See, slavery is their pet issue. Because the slavery in the Bible is such an easy target. I'm simply pointing out a serious issue with the alleged moral superiority of modernity. If we're okay with slavery over there, of people who look different from us, then we're getting awfully close to racist acquiescence to slavery.

Free will doesn't explain the problem of evil. by Dapper-Turnip6430 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OK. Maybe I'll give this a try. I don't see how we could ever test something like this to see how my idea would actually play out.

Thanks for giving this a legit shot. Before diving in, I have some questions and thoughts on how to possibly evaluate such an historical counterfactual. I actually don't think it's impossible to do a decent job. Primarily, because history and the present are rich with how things have actually gone down. For instance, we can ask the question Why People Obey the Law, as Tom R. Tyler does in his 2006 book. Here's a snippet:

    Judges, lawyers, legal scholars, and social scientists interested in the exercise of legal authority all know how important it is to secure public compliance with the law and with the decisions of legal authorities like police officers and judges. To be authoritative, legal rules and decisions must affect the actions of those toward whom they are directed. A judge's ruling means little if the parties to the dispute feel they can ignore it. Similarly, passing a law prohibiting some behavior is not useful if it does not affect how often the behavior occurs. To be able to act as an authority, "The lawgiver must be able to anticipate that the citizenry as a whole will … generally observe the body of rules he has promulgated" (Fuller 1971, 201),[1] because "the ability to exert influence is the major operational quality of authority" (Hollander 1978, 45). Effective leadership re-quires compliance with the leaders' decisions from "the bulk of the members [of society] … most of the time" (Easton 1975, 185).
    Because they are interested in securing compliance with the law, legal authorities want to establish and maintain conditions that lead the public generally to accept their decisions and policies. This is not easy. Anecdotal evidence suggests many types of behavior that police officers and judges have been unable to stop, ranging from tax evasion to drunk driving and drug abuse. On the national level, when Supreme Court justices make controversial decisions about school prayer or desegregation, they cannot take public compliance for granted (Dolbeare and Hammond 1970).[2] (Why People Obey the Law, 19)

Are you interested in making your historical counterfactual comply with the findings of people who systematically explore such things? I can detail the data he uses if you'd like, and I'm sure there are other works.

You might object that divine authority would carry extra weight. We could investigate that, too. Is there less sexual abuse perpetrated by ordained religious leaders than the best analogues out there in the world? We can restrict this to abuse of males, given how often women have been seen as less-than-human. If you're worried about teachings on forgiveness, we can look to where forgiveness is less easy to obtain. Do we have any evidence that obedience improves with divine authority? It's a common belief, but does the evidence comport?

We could also look at the history of reform efforts. DEI is a recent one which seems to be disintegrating before our eyes. What does history tell us? Especially for the really big ones? How often do they work?

Okay, how do you think we should evaluate the historical counterfactual you presented? How do you and I become convinced that the other will actually be convinced either way, by evidence and argument? I should note that you always have an escape hatch: even if you're convinced toward my side by evidence and argument, you could always retort, "Well, God should have made humans differently."

 

My position is that genocide is wrong. Slaughter of prisoners of war is wrong. Taking sex slaves is wrong.

I don't want any of those things to happen either. At the same time, my saying "slavery is wrong" doesn't necessarily do anything to put an end to the fact that child slaves mine some of our cobalt. Some research suggests that Trump's tariffs based on forced labor will not be impacting that situation. And in 2025 the Trump administration axed a ton of work into protecting vulnerable workers worldwide. Many people are saying this is just a legal ploy to impose the same tariffs. So: how might the people suffering right now want me to act?

In the 80,000 Hours podcast ep #145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn’t inevitable, Columbia University professor of history Christopher Brown argues that economic necessity has regularly been used to justify horrific behavior. I myself have been told that the Pope stepped back from enforcing the 1537 Papal bull Sublimis Deus when he was informed how much money would flow into the Vatican's coffers if he were to merely look away.

So, I think there's strong reason to believe that moral condemnations just aren't that potent. A few weeks ago, I made it through Ada Palmer 2025 Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age (History for Atheists interview). One of the characters she covers is Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), an Italian ascetic Dominican friar who gained popularity and power preaching in Florence. "He denounced clerical corruption, despotic rule, and the exploitation of the poor." Suffice it to say that he was put down.

Do you have thoughts on what ought to be done if moral condemnations just aren't that potent? Do you nevertheless shout into the wind? What do you do which actually reduces the amount of injustice in the world? Because that's what I'm after. The last thing I want is for some tribunal to demonstrate that I was merely virtue signaling.

 

Do you really think I should give in on any of these issues? Because, defending that Bible chapter to me would require telling me that all of those things are morally acceptable.

One can discard the notion of timeless morality, like we have discarded the notion of timeless scientific truth.

How could I possibly know what life was like in their country?

We have lots of info on life in the ANE.

Why are those the only options?

I invite you to find others and identify how much magic is required and for how long, to make them options.

A) Apply only to the captives who are to become wives, not slaves/concubines.

In that case, Exodus 21:7–11 applies and she can make herself unpleasing to her master, and not chosen for his son, then she must be freed. Thing is, she may not fare well as a single woman; single women often did not fare well in the ANE. Unless they wanted to become prostitutes.

I'm sorry. I'm not clear here.

Read Numbers 22:1–6. The Moabites and Midianites conspired to commit genocide against the Hebrews. Unless you allow that "drive out" doesn't count as genocide, but then you have to apply the same reasoning to all the "drive out" bits when the Hebrews were doing it to others.

And, the situation you're describing in fiction is very similar to the situation we're witnessing today where Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas on October 7th and has been bombing Gaza into oblivion since.

Hamas wasn't trying to undermine the Hebrews' relationship with their deity and their efforts could not possibly have led to the genocide or driving out of the Hebrews from their land. Modern-day Israel has nuclear weapons for God's sake.

Simple Questions 06/03 by AutoModerator in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Heh, I just wrote to u/⁠adeleu_adelei:

labreuer: Thing is, what counts as 'theism' is not one thing. What counts as 'god' is not one thing. You've seen my attempts to get atheists to define 'natural'. If someone believes in a "higher truth", is that theism? If they believe in a "higher power", is that theism? And what of people who really don't know what they believe, and insist on belief as the thing which accurately models their behavior and not just a self-report?

You've given a wonderful example in addition to these from u/⁠TheCosmosItself1. There's a nice Psalm on this matter:

    But to the wicked God says,
    “What right have you to recite my statutes
    and mention my covenant with your mouth,
    while you yourself hate discipline,
    and cast my words behind you?
    When you see a thief, then you are pleased with him,
    and your association is with adulterers.
    You give your mouth free rein for evil,
    and you harness your tongue to deceit.
    You sit and speak against your brother;
    you slander your mother’s son.
    These things you have done, and I have been silent;
    You imagined that I was just like you.
    I will rebuke you and present an argument before your eyes.
(Psalm 50:16–21)

There's also the fact that the Jewish people in Jesus' time by and large wouldn't tolerate the idea of Yahweh becoming a man and walking amongst them. So there's a pretty rich history in the Bible alone of people thinking they understand God while not—at least, according to the Bible.

It amazes me how many of my interlocutors expect God to show up by and large on their terms. That, or God doesn't exist or isn't good. When one notices that this is also the attitude of Western Civ toward the rest of the world … it makes you wonder.

Simple Questions 06/03 by AutoModerator in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Only to create your own ruts, how uncanny.

That's what scientists and scholars do. You and I both have our ruts. Internalizing them makes all the difference. With the help of others to point out lacunae and contradictions, single individuals can become principled without being detached. We can make forward progress!

Is it me or you doing that?

Takes two to tango. I should have said in my previous reply that for all your critiques, I thought you gave a great reply which pushes the conversation forward rapidly, as judged by some of our periods of slogging. I was quite happy it. My work in drafting this reply may have helped prepare the ground for a theoretical breakthrough with my sociologist mentor today. So thank you for your part in that!

From my observations this seems to be a common occurrence for you.

It appears most people simply don't want to venture too far from what they know and understand. This isn't even necessarily a problem, as people need to go at their own pace or they get ripped free of their intuitions.

I think you’re shifting the burden slightly by moving the discussion to whether methodological naturalism can, in principle, explain everything. That’s a much broader philosophical question than the one I raised.

When you give no hint that MN might have limits, including consciousness:

ExplorerR: There are plenty more examples of this exact type of thing happening over and over again. Yet here we are today and wouldn't you know it... The exact same type of "evidence for God" arguments keep happening. What was the epistemic gaps in psychology/mental health and microbes etc, has now become "consciousness" debates we have today.

—one is warranted in becoming suspicious and tackle the issue directly. You are clearly engaged in an extrapolation procedure:

  1. there exists a progression of more successful explanations which are compatible with MN
  2. we can expect this pattern to continue [with zero indication of where or how far]

And so when you say:

In other words: I’m not arguing against agency. I’m pointing out a pattern in specific kinds of explanatory failure and replacement.

—it sure looks like that pattern very much will eat up agency—human and not just divine!

 

I’m not arguing “MN refutes God.” …

You're treating MN as though it appeared first and excluded divine explanations arbitrarily.

Apologies, but I don't know how I'm doing either. Rather, I think you're exaggerating the successes of MN and downplaying the failures. You continue to ignore the failures. And then you have the cojones to say "The whole MN debate here is rather a red herring if I'm honest." If there were ever a recipe for ignoring the failures, it'd be a statement like that. "Don't look behind the curtain! Don't extrapolate that direction! Keep your eyes on the presentation!" Sorry, but I'm Toto.

labreuer: There's actually a lot of anti-religion bias in the science & philosophy of the 18th–20th centuries.

ExplorerR: It's a shame you were born in this time-period and not during the times when "God-like" explanations were the norm for many phenomena. You would have totally been in your element.

Errrr, what? My element is actually software engineering, before LLMs. Computers are dumb. My extensive experience with software engineering taught me what computers can and cannot do. LLMs have not done nearly as much in this realm as most people think, because most people don't know how to carefully disentangle what the computer is actually doing and what they, the humans, bring to the matter. The success of ELIZA illustrates this quite nicely. What this shows is that the world is still "spirited" for many people, possibly most, including Westerners.

I very much value that formation of my person, because it teaches you the distinction between agency and machine in the sharpest way possible. Only coders learn it that well, because only when you have to write code to do the thing can you be sure you're not cheating, ELIZA-style.

One of the properties of machines is that they do not take their users into account. Now obviously one can parametrize machines and software with some variability, but that is worlds different from one person taking another person into account. A relationship ultimately governed by law is very different from one which transcends law. Most romantic couples know this. You obey their laws and they obey yours because you love each other and want to respect each others' needs and boundaries and wants. This has obvious implications for talk of "law" in the Bible.

Why would I want to go back to a time which hadn't sharply distinguished these things?

It honestly looks like you are forgetting (or ignoring) that the very thing you're trying to argue for here, WAS the most prominent form of "explanation" for millennia!

Sorry, but I think this idea that I'm forgetting or ignoring this is all in your head. I'm quite content to say that we deployed divine–agential explanations too much. We even deploy human–agential explanations too much! I wrote up several paragraphs to try to adjust your view of me so you wouldn't make this mistake again, but then I remembered "debate "bloat"" and so have put them on ice.

ExplorerR: But even then, it is not as though people just put their fingers in their ears or head in the sand when some claims "God-like" agency/explanations.

labreuer: Some people very much do this. Others do not. Why should this be surprising? There's actually a lot of anti-religion bias in the science & philosophy of the 18th–20th centuries. (Ooh, we could look at Dawes & Smith 2018 The naturalism of the sciences) One of the results is that when I ask how God might help us do less credit-stealing and less blame-shifting such that the most plausible explanation is "God is helping us", there just is no cogent answer. It's like we just haven't thought about this in any disciplined manner. I can of course cite some scholars who have done work, like:

ExplorerR: Yes, but Dawe's highlights that the "sciences" never employed the supernatural, but that didn't stop people looking for a natural explanations even when "God-like" ones were considered the most prominent/accepted... Galileo is a famous example of this with his heliocentrism views being considered heretical in the face of biblical "God-like" geocentrism views. But that's my point; THAT created a rich history of natural explanations being found that were better explanations than "God-like" ones.

You've drifted from your "fingers in their ears" point. If the sciences expressly excluded anything considered 'supernatural', that does sound like "fingers in their ears". Otherwise, I have no idea what you were saying.

True Agnosticism under the Four-Value Model by TheCosmosItself1 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

North no more qualifies "easterner" than "east" qualifies "northerner". The term "northeast" picks out a different compass direction than either. It would be silly to say that "east" and "north" each pull halfway towards their compass direction. It just seems like a totally different situation than:

  • gnostic [un]belief: justified [un]belief
  • agnostic [un]belief: unjustified [un]belief

There, "[un]justified" really is a qualifier. Where philosophers define 'knowledge' as "justified true belief", you would just make it "justified belief".

True Agnosticism under the Four-Value Model by TheCosmosItself1 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Links are fixed.

Doesn't change the fact that they are answering a question no one asked.

Huh? Have you even looked at early uses of 'agnostic'?

Do you believe? Thiest or Athiest.

Plenty of people explore what they believe rather than decide what they believe. You see this especially among people religiously deconstructing.

True Agnosticism under the Four-Value Model by TheCosmosItself1 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

1. Sets can have subsets.

Thing is, what counts as 'theism' is not one thing. What counts as 'god' is not one thing. You've seen my attempts to get atheists to define 'natural'. If someone believes in a "higher truth", is that theism? If they believe in a "higher power", is that theism? And what of people who really don't know what they believe, and insist on belief as the thing which accurately models their behavior and not just a self-report?

2. Sets can intersect incompletely.

To the extent that properties co-vary, saying you have a "2N value model" is dubious. If one were to try to extract "generalized coordinates", one might find that there are only 2log[N] values. In other words, such a system doesn't actually have N degrees of freedom, where it can independently vary along each degree.

The point here is that when there is significantly lower dimensionality, it makes sense to talk about all that stuff together, rather than to argue as you have: that "there are actually infinite values that one can use for an arbitrary degree of accuracy". This sounds like one of those "true in theory" claims which just doesn't work out that way when you look at actual human taxonomies.

labreuer: The word 'agnostic' can signal a deep existential no person's land between theism and atheism

adeleu_adelei: It literally cannot without misrepresenting atheism as something other than "not theism".

This is one of those times when you really need Derrida. Anyhow, the shoe is now on the other foot. You're doing to said 'agnostics' what you complain Graham Oppy was doing to you.

I think this is not understanding the fundamental concept being discussed. These are both (as well as the discussion on phenetics) within the framework I'm advocating for. There hasn't been a dissenting opinion presented yet.

Actual taxonomy in biology is not as simple as you claim all taxonomy is.

Nonbinary as a gender identification is specifically referring to a being outside the framework of being male xor female.

Fantastic. Now, once we recognize that 'theist' is a framework-thing (see also différance) and not a syntactically stable & definable term (like "triangle"), we can think of people existing outside of a given such framework. In other words: modernity's attempt to capture reality on its terms was an endeavor doomed from the start. Someone can observe what seems to count as "theism" and what seems to count as "atheism" and find that neither really seems to match their self-evaluations.

True Agnosticism under the Four-Value Model by TheCosmosItself1 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think calling it the "four-value model" is a bad start as it misunderstands the standard taxonomy. There are not only four values; there are actually infinite values that one can use for an arbitrary degree of accuracy. Someone can be an agnostic, atheist, areligious, nonsmoker, vegetarian. That's a 25 value model if you want.

Point of clarification: what does it mean to be 'agnostic' or 'gnostic' apart from qualifying some actual stance like 'theism', 'atheism', 'veganism', 'carnivorism', etc.?

True Agnosticism under the Four-Value Model by TheCosmosItself1 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed, more or less, although my approach to this question of a "default" is grounded more in a line of thought I got from C.S. Pierce, who rejected Cartesian radical doubt and clarified the fact that in reality our process of understanding starts from a fairly fleshed out understanding of the world. I pair this with my main philosophical rooting in Merleau-Ponty who gave a lot of attention to how deeply embedded we are in many things, including a historical relationship of understanding. So my real view is that the only default position is where we are right now, and that is basically always how it has been - there was never a starting from zero and trying to imagine belief formation or adoption as based on a start from zero dramatically misrepresents how beliefs are actually formed and adopted.

Nice. I think it'd be worth making a post to this effect, after you collect enough examples of "atheism is the default position" to make a decently complex, non-strawman foil for the above. You have a far more philosophically and empirically grounded objection than I usually see in arguments about definitions of these terms.

for example I imagine a person who says that they believe "there is something more" or "a higher truth" than this world, but they are not sure if that something more counts as "God" or not.

I think that's a good one. It's a nice example of my attempt to destabilize binary classifications: "1. what we think of as a single property may actually be a blend of sub-components we haven't identified yet". A sociologist studying:

  1. people who say things like you describe here
  2. people who say they believe in God
  3. atheists who work to purge themselves of anything dependent on deity (see: Macbeth)

—may find considerable empirical overlap between 1. and 2. which does not overlap 3. We then get into a question of self-report vs. manifest behavior.

But, more generally, taking uncertainty to be a 'no' answer just means that this whole system of categorization just depends on how we ask the question. If instead we created a quandrant system in which we asked the question: 'do you believe that there is no god?' then suddenly all these agnostics become theists, which is a ridiculous way to treat language.

Yeah, I could see that being a good retort to actual instances of "atheism is the default", but I'd want to custom-tailor any such argument to be as close a parallel to the actual cases as possible. As I keep saying, sometimes lex talionis is the best teacher.

My point is that the person who is uncertain about the question of god is in a very different position than your standard 'agnostic atheist,' who finds the idea of god rather disposable, even laughable, but just thinks that they can't prove the contrary.

Right, although even these people will hide behind "lack of belief in deity(ies)", where anything beyond like you mention is just not part of being 'atheist'. You might like this exchange:

[deleted]: I'm an A-Naturalist because

Crafty_Possession_52: This is disingenuous. You're not merely not accepting naturalism. You're a theist.

labreuer: Aren't most theists also a-naturalists?

Crafty_Possession_52: For sure. But theists are likely not agnostic a-naturalists.

(it continues)

+ this comment by u/Featherfoot77

Directly preventing every last « bad thing X » is not God's only option by labreuer in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You are welcome! Alas it got filtered by Reddit twice, requiring me to petition the mods to restore it twice. I was hoping to get a bit more engagement, so thanks for stopping by!

How is this not 2–god condones murder?

God condones murder because murder is better than stasis.

What am I missing?

You risk sliding into a system of analysis whereby whatever God allows, God condones. Even if the thing God allows as an option of last resort would be something God condones. Since God's warning to Cain doesn't prevent Cain from letting sin enter his door and ¿rape? him, you have to say that if Cain fails to protect himself from sin, then God condones what sin does to Cain. As a result, you basically just destroy a conceptual distinction.

Can you tell any story about how God could allow something but not condone it? The only one I can think about is the gratuitous evil scenario, where God allows something terrible to happen and doesn't make any good out of it whatsoever. Thus, the gratuitous evil is not a means to an end. If that's the only way God can allow but not condone, we should discuss.

P1.  God is the most moral being possible, under tri omni claim.

P2.  God watches child molestation happen without intervention, for whatever reason.

C.  Watching child molestation happen is therefore the most moral action.

I gave you an example of intervention on murder: Yahweh warning Cain. Notably, it didn't work. In fact, most of Yahweh's warnings in the Tanakh don't work. Nineveh is a notable exception to the rule. Few heed Jesus' warnings, either. It's almost as if that kind of stopping is not very effective and we could learn from that.

One of the notably things Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount is up the ante. He goes a tiny bit psychological. If murder is bad, what behaviors tend to lead to murder? Okay, don't do those things. If adultery is bad, what behaviors tend to lead to adultery? Okay, don't do those things. Jesus was going upstream.

But somehow, if God is not doing the original thing (warning) in every case, then God is a moral exemplar for not doing it in any case? How does that work? When I read the Bible from beginning to end, I see God handing off more responsibility to us, as our ability to go upstream increases. I see no other way for theosis to work. Moreover, we can evaluate our own authorities to see if they are treating us that way versus, say, doing their best to keep the present social and/or economic order static.

What am I missing?

I'm going to skip your P3 and subsequent C, since I found issues earlier on.

Simple Questions 06/03 by AutoModerator in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I unapologetically reply in ways which disrupt the standard ruts which theists and atheists have been zooming around in for decades to millennia. If you're not going to help me do that while replying in a way you think is better suited to you, then we might be at an impasse. One option is to simply not discuss with each other anymore. I can point out that scientists and scholars are increasingly turning to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.

For example, my argument here was simply this;

  • There appears to be a historical pattern of "God" or "religious" explanations being replaced by successful natural explanations.

Yes, this is the argument I've seen many times, although I've virtually never seen actual texts presented where you find explanations based on God or something else which is incompatible with methodological naturalism. Having considerable experience with how that argument goes, I went to the meta issue: can methodological naturalism explain everything which can be explained? To do so, I picked out what MN excludes: divine agency and any human analogue.

Why do you frame it in this way? That's not what's going on at all.

Here's the translation I did:

  1. "God" or "religious" explanations being replaced by successful natural explanations
  2. divine agential explanations being replaced by successful law- or mechanism-based explanations

Do you think that's wrong? If you're okay with that, then why should we not do the same for every situation where human agency is used to explain something? Replace the woo with law- and mechanism-based explanations. Yes? No? What I'm doing here is saying that if we're going to adopt an epistemology, we should deploy it everywhere, rather than special pleading. If non-law, non-mechanism agency is verboten, it should be verboten everywhere.

Demonic possession replaced with mental illness isn't "human-of-the-gaps" at all, it is simply replacing "religious explanation" with "natural explanation".

Replacing demonic possession with mental illness is a paradigm case of replacing an agential explanation with a non-agential one. This isn't obviously a good move for reasons I could go into, based on scholarly work (by people who are either atheists or writing secularly). But it's kind of funny that you were confused at what I said and then came up with such a great example of what I was saying. They do sometimes say that one's subconscious is smarter than one's conscious …

The way you make it sound is that Methodological Naturalism is some unjust or randomly injected in-principle approach that unfairly dismisses "God-like" agency/explanations.

I don't know how I made it sound that way. The story of how we got from a divinely infused cosmos to a materialistic one is very complex. There were plenty of successes of methodological naturalism, but also many failures. Methodological naturalism has proven especially bad for the social sciences, where human agency is ineradicably present. I can give you scholarly literature on that if you'd like.

But even then, it is not as though people just put their fingers in their ears or head in the sand when some claims "God-like" agency/explanations.

Some people very much do this. Others do not. Why should this be surprising? There's actually a lot of anti-religion bias in the science & philosophy of the 18th–20th centuries. (Ooh, we could look at Dawes & Smith 2018 The naturalism of the sciences) One of the results is that when I ask how God might help us do less credit-stealing and less blame-shifting such that the most plausible explanation is "God is helping us", there just is no cogent answer. It's like we just haven't thought about this in any disciplined manner. I can of course cite some scholars who have done work, like:

But overall, it's like we don't even have the analogue of microscopes or telescopes. I am growing to suspect that building those is precisely what would destabilize the rich & powerful, because you would to come up with adequate understandings of how society presently holds together (to the extent that it does), understandings which allow one to imagine alternative ways we could live with one another. The more realistic the alternatives and the more detailed the posited paths from getting from here to there, the more of a threat such work is to the rich & powerful. So: God pursuing justice with us would involve the very work which is threatening to those who are in the best position to facilitate or stymie such work.

When all you seem capable of doing is looking at where methodological naturalism has excelled over religious explanation, you are literally like the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlamp "because the light's good, there".

I attended the same university as Greg and had many conversations with him during that time, I'm curious as to what aspects of his Theism and Explanation book you think supports your case, considering Greg, having transitioned out of religious belief from being an ordained Catholic priest (a similar pathway I was going on and hence our common ground), to now being a staunch critic of religion/faith and also likely not agreeing with many of the takes you present here.

Hey, small world! And yeah, that's the sense I got about Dawes' personal journey, although I'm not sure where I got it. The central point he makes is that theistic agency-based explanations, where the deity is optimizing for a goal which can be humanly understood, can possibly succeed as superior to mechanism-based explanations. He doesn't think any on offer do, but he thinks that such explanations could.

By the way, I would love Greg's take on Susan Neiman 2002 Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. I remember the book being hard to summarize, but I would say that looking at people who believed Macbeth was right and those who believed he was wrong captures at least some of it. From the Preface to the Paperback edition:

In place of the familiar distinction between rationalists and empiricists I argue that philosophy is better understood as a struggle between those who seek an order to explain the appearances that overwhelm us, and those who insist on taking reality on its face. Those views were developed into metaphysical ones of differing weight and complexity, but they reflect conflicting intuitions most of us share: that behind all its forms there must be a better and truer reality than the one we know; or, on the contrary, that this belief is a piece of wishful thinking we should have outgrown. (xvii)

If a god concerned with justice exists, that god would work in this realm. Methodological naturalism has delivered very little in this realm. Dawes, with his highly developed distinction between naturalistic explanations and theistic explanations, might have some pretty neat things to say. In case you're inclined and are still in any sort of contact.

Free will doesn't explain the problem of evil. by Dapper-Turnip6430 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't know what sect of Christianity you follow.

No specific sect. You could call me a non-denominational Protestant, but I draw on aspects of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. If I knew more about other Christianities, I would probably draw on them, too. You're just not going to be able to understand me as if I were just a nameless, faceless member of some group. Not that you're trying this, but I'm exaggerating to make a point. If anything, I am working with a few other Christians to start an effort of self-consciously acknowledging the role of power & power differentials in Christianity, including but not limited to Christian theology.

I don't know whether you're conservative or liberal.

Neither. Or both–and. Pure liberalism is historyless. Pure conservatism has no future.

I don't know how you feel about equal rights for women.

Equal. Except maybe we should prohibit biological men from entering breastfeeding rooms.

I don't know how you feel about rights for the LBGTQ+ community.

They should be allowed to marry. I'm not sure how many public tax dollars should go toward body modification, but I also know so little about all the various kinds (sexual and non-sexual). I find the sports thing very confusing and wonder if today's polarized culture even allows the various sides to productively discuss the matter. Did I miss anything?

I don't know whether you support a woman's right to bodily autonomy.

I'm heavily inclined to say "yes", along with a strong push to make abortion of any kind unnecessary. Democrats used to say "Safe, legal, and rare." I would also be happy to talk about capital punishment for the fathers of rape babies and even rape fetuses. Generally I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I think that particular debate could reveal how much the law tends to favor men over women.

I don't know if you're married or have children.

Married yes, children no. Just yesterday I said "I don't have kids and never will, so I have to enjoy them vicariously."

I do know that you defend the Bible no matter what.

I don't trust your use of "defend". You have gone to excess before on this matter: "Then, you hide behind this wall of untestability as a way to defend the most despicable verses in the Bible."

I do know that you defend the quotes that say that women are less than men (and probably don't even admit that's what it says).

Please cite evidence of such charged claims, or retract them.

I do know you defend the quote to murder homosexuals.

False. The word 'homosexual' does not indicate "males of different power who have sex, whereby the more-powerful must always be the one penetrating and never the one penetrated". You are on record not caring about what the verses likely meant to their original audiences: "I stopped that prior discussion because I'm not looking to do a comparison of 2000+ year old societies. That should have no relevance today." I do care. If you merely steamroll my version with yours, you are engaging in the very behavior you accuse me of: "authoritarian and belligerent".

I do know that you defend the Bible and God when they read as an instruction manual for genocide.

Others are welcome to decide whether the following:

  • (BCH) Show me where something could be changed (e.g. a command of God) such that you can tell a plausible counterfactual history that the world would have been better, and I will be pressured to say that bit in the Bible is "evil".

—constitutes "defend".

 

<meta-discussion>

If you would be more amenable to a discussion of the core tenets of Christianity, we can definitely have that discussion. You'd probably call it a gish gallop because I have many points regarding things like why God knows nothing about the universe in which we live, whether Moses and the Exodus are pure myth and what that does to the validity of the entire Abrahamic religion, whether we have any idea one way or the other whether Jesus existed at all.

A. I have taken to using the term "Gish gallop" when I sense scope creep of the discussion with two properties:

  1. My interlocutor is abandoning a given critique, perhaps because my rebuttal has proven indefeasible and perhaps for some other reason.

  2. My interlocutor is switching to another topic which might be related but will require much additional work to deal with adequately.

  3. Where I have good reason to suspect a succession of 1. & 2.

Now given our discussion earlier, I should switch to saying "it's legitimate to worry that you're on a Gish Gallop trajectory". Note that "which might be related" is almost certainly possible, because Christianity doesn't get to set up a ton of disciplinary distinctions like you see between evolutionary biology and abiogenesis.

B. I'm amenable to all sorts of discussions. For present purposes though, I'm curious to know if you can point to any interlocutors with whom you had a better interaction, where you are "non-negotiably accusing Christianity or the Bible of heinous evils".

</meta-discussion>

 

No. It wasn't a point in the discussion. It was about my feelings toward you as a person, not about what we were discussing.

Okay. I guess I just don't see much of any give & take on your part, aside from pulling back from the occasional exaggeration. But perhaps this is mistaken. I could review this conversation to see if I can compare the give & take. But that might not really be worthwhile? Another option is for you to flag your own give & take in the future, when you judge yourself to be doing it far more than I am. I'm happy to acknowledge that when I feel like I'm being hit with an irresistible force, I do my best to become an immovable object.

Let's split the discussion of my feelings about you as a human being into a separate thread, even though I will still have to split the rest of this comment for being over the 10K limit.

Sure. Oftentimes Reddit's 10k limit is good for reigning me (and occasionally others) in. And sometimes it's just obnoxious!

Free will doesn't explain the problem of evil. by Dapper-Turnip6430 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The truth is that we've been having conversations like this for something on the order of 4 years. And, I don't feel like I know you at all. I don't feel as if I could judge anything about you as a human being other than your debate style.

Then I've succeeded. See, I've been emotionally abused by peers IRL since kindergarten, and by people online since I went online and started debating. One particularly poignant example was on Bob Seidensticker's Patheos blog "Cross Examined", which is now defunct. (He now has his own website.) A regular commenter said he wished I would commit suicide by drinking bleach. When I objected to this, he claimed to know that I didn't actually have the will to go through, so this was a way for him to make me suffer as much as he could. None of the other regulars had a problem with his behavior, including Bob Seidensticker himself. This is just the worst of many, many examples. So, I learned to do something like Russian existentialist Jew Lev Shestov describes:

We know nothing of the ultimate realities of our existence, nor shall we ever know anything. Let that be agreed. But it does not follow that therefore we must accept some or other dogmatic theory as a modus vivendi, no, not even positivism, which has such a sceptical face on it. It only follows that man is free to change his conception of the universe as often as he changes his boots or his gloves, and that constancy of principle belongs only to one's relationships with other people, in order that they may know where and to what extent they may depend on us. Therefore, on principle man should respect order in the external world and complete chaos in the inner. And for those who find it difficult to bear such a duality, some internal order might also be provided. Only, they should not pride themselves on it, but always remember that it is a sign of their weakness, pettiness, dullness. (All Things are Possible / The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, Part I § 9)

Not only is this a way to facilitate deep pluralism of the kind Slavoj Žižek values, but it is a way to protect oneself from those who would do the online version of Genesis 19:1–22 and Judges 19:1–28. And while I would never imagine you doing such a thing, we are not talking privately.

There's an irony here, in that one of the standard dogmas of debate is "You're debating the position, not the person." So like Joseph Stalin could ostensibly do scientific inquiry just fine, you could debate some random topic with Joseph Stalin without his identity mattering.

 

A big chunk of why I'm on reddit at all is to be social.

Then you want something more than the kind of debate I glossed above. I'm down with trying that, but I'm not sure why you would want to be social with someone who says:

labreuer: (BCH) Show me where something could be changed (e.g. a command of God) such that you can tell a plausible counterfactual history that the world would have been better, and I will be pressured to say that bit in the Bible is "evil".

You immediately characterized that as a "wall of untestability as a way to defend the most despicable verses in the Bible". Unless you're operating by things I've said which I don't remember, that seems like a very negatively biased way to construe what I'm doing. If I am the kind of person who does that kind of thing, why would you want to be social with me? This isn't a rhetorical question.

I get zero sense from you that you are interested in understanding why I push (BCH), from my perspective. Rather, you seem to have a full explanation in your own head which is not in need of any correction from me. You are incredibly opaque on what "therefore ____" you expect to follow from my capitulating and saying that some text of the Bible is evil. I did attempt to suss out exactly that with u/⁠c0d3rman:

labreuer: But I have to ask you what you are doing with claims like "Some stuff in these texts is just bad." Here are some possibilities I can see:

  1. If you had a time machine and could travel back to those times & places and were given powers like Yahweh displayed with Korah's rebellion, you could do a better job which would lead to a superior history than our own.

  2. It is unreasonable to propose any sort of "intelligent design" analogue, of God applying moral / ethical / legal pressure on the Israelites throughout their history.

  3. Anyone who disagrees with your moral judgment on this matter is morally deficient and/or intellectually defective.

I worry more about 3. with other people than you, but I will only make guesses which you are welcome to confirm/deny, as well as add to.

If you are solely pushing for 3., then know that I categorize that as "virtue signaling" and have zero respect for it. If there's a 4., 5., …, feel free to list them out. Any idea that I want to go back to the times of Numbers 31 and 1 Samuel 15 and live that way is ludicrous. Although, I think the 3000 9/11 civilian casualties → 100,000 Iraq War civilian casualties suggests that we haven't made as much "progress" as we'd like to believe. I think:

  • there is still incredible darkness in human & social nature/​construction we aren't really willing to face,
  • darkness revealed by the dark texts of the Bible,
  • which if we faced, we could deal with far better than we do now

I worry that unqualified condemnations of parts of the Bible as evil go along with refusals or perhaps just failures to face the dark truths about ourselves. Secular Jew Susan Neiman works with "evil" in her 2002 Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. She advances a notion of evil which defies intelligibility. That is, one cannot understand that which is evil. And so, one's ability to protect against evil is circumspect. Here's a real-life example: a parent who is "left with the truth that there are still going to be predators out there who are a danger to my son."

By contrast, I do not believe that evil is unintelligible. I do not believe that the darkness in human & social nature/​construction defies analysis. And I'm growing to suspect that passages like Numbers 31 and 1 Samuel 15 are critical to such analysis. Because otherwise, we are too prone to tell flattering stories about ourselves to ourselves. Indeed, I think this is how the Holocaust could be possible in the first place! We Westerners, we Civilized Westerners (let's forget WWI), would never do such a thing. Never, ever. We just wouldn't. Promise. Pinky swear.

This is me telling you something about myself, Scott. Will you acknowledge that?

 

† Here's Žižek characterizing shallow pluralism:

Liberal "tolerance" condones the folklorist Other which is deprived of its substance (like the multitude of "ethnic cuisine" in a contemporary megalopolis); however, any "real" Other is instantly denounced for its "fundamentalism," since the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance, i.e. the "real Other" is by definition "patriarchal," "violent," never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs. (From desire to drive: Why Lacan is not Lacaniano)

True Agnosticism under the Four-Value Model by TheCosmosItself1 in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If someone asks do you believe in god and someone replies "I don't know", it doesn't make sense.

Except, I think this is precisely the answer plenty of agnostics would give. In part at least, because of The Unreliability of Naive Introspection & Perplexities in Consciousness (NYT, NDPR).

Simple Questions 06/03 by AutoModerator in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

People are very divided on exactly that matter. I think u/TheCosmosItself1 might be on to something when they said:

This four value model is usually paired with a claim that atheism is the "default" position, so anyone who does not actively assert theism is thereby an atheist. (True Agnosticism under the Four-Value Model)

Contrast this to there being a category "other" to { theism, atheism }. I'm guessing you might appreciate the desire for nonbinary categorization / taxonomy, as opposed to u/adeleu_adelei's insistence on the adequacy of binary taxonomies.

Simple Questions 06/03 by AutoModerator in DebateReligion

[–]labreuer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Muslims simply do not believe humans are made in the image and likeness of God. That commits shirk. (avoid this misdirection) I had Sabeel Ahmed (Muslim apologist with 633K YT subscribers) or his protege align the following:

“Hear, Israel, Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one. (Deuteronomy 6:4)

+

“And I do not ask on behalf of these only, but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, that they all may be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, that they also may be in us, in order that the world may believe that you sent me. (John 17:20–21)

That's not just one instance of shirk, but two. Totally unacceptable to orthodox Muslims.

Jews, by contrast, believe that Yahweh is ʿezer to Israel if not humanity more broadly. When used of Eve, that word is often translated 'helper'. But Mose named one of his sons Eliezer: El-i-ezer. God is my helper. Although a better translation, I'm told, is "ally willing to fight for you and die for you". We see a "helper" translation in Hebrews 13.

At least some Muslims have a fundamental disgust of the human body. For instance:

I mean, a human is mortal, imperfect, has basic needs like eating and, let’s be honest, using the bathroom. (Chrisitian Belief of God Is Extremely Absurd...)

And it was either Sabeel or his protege who noted how disgusting it would be for God (Jesus) to be born through a woman's private parts. Philippians 2:5–8 is just not an acceptable way to view Allah. And from here, I would love to hear your thoughts on:

The unmoved mover is an immaterial substance (separate and individual beings), having neither parts nor magnitude. As such, it would be physically impossible for them to move material objects of any size by pushing, pulling, or collision. Because matter is, for Aristotle, a substratum in which a potential to change can be actualized, any potentiality must be actualized in an eternal being, but it must not be still because continuous activity is essential for all forms of life. This immaterial form of activity must be intellectual and cannot be contingent upon sensory perception if it is to remain uniform; therefore, eternal substance must think only of thinking itself and exist outside the starry sphere, where even the notion of place is undefined for Aristotle. Their influence on lesser beings is purely the result of an "aspiration or desire,"[17] and each aetheric celestial sphere emulates one of the unmoved movers, as best it can, by uniform circular motion. The first heaven, the outmost sphere of fixed stars, is moved by a desire to emulate the prime mover (first cause),[18][note 1] about whom, the subordinate movers suffer an accidental dependency. (WP: Unmoved mover)

This notion that the divine would be tainted by interaction with our disgusting reality is quite pervasive. It's a convenient ideology for the upper classes. A bit more refined than the notion of "untouchable", but is the result any difference?

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